[usrusr]

And then you get to a cardio unit where you want a completely different set of features and have to start over. Going lean on hardware only makes sense when you push out a very high number of units, when you have to deal with battery constraints or when you just have a lot of intertia, the combination of existing codebase and developer filter skillset.

[pjmlp]

Except all the machines have the same feature set I mentioned.

Agree that wanting to hire cheap developers is why they did it that way, the current interface is so laggy that I would bet it is Web based, on top of running Android for nothing.

[rswail]

That's not a problem of the platform, but is a problem of the developers.

The extra cost of an Android capable tablet (maybe $200 especially wholesale) is a minimal hardware cost considering the overall price of the equipment is in the thousands.

But finding good embedded developers is a very difficult problem to solve, much easier to find Android app developers and then you get the Android eco-system for free like device management, OTA updates etc.

Put all the sensors and controls on a USB bus and you need one or two actual embedded developers to deal with the drivers and the rest of the developers can build the UI that people see.

In the case of a gym, the person buying the equipment is the customer, not you.

They want features that will make you "sticky" to the gym, plus save costs on training you on how to use the equipment.

[usrusr]

Cardio units have neither a "weight bar" nor a repetition counter, but they have a whole universe of possible features in the realm of scripted sequences, reactions to HRM signals and even just "making time pass" features. With unbounded gimmickyness, the sky is the limit.

Personally, I'm a bit of an aficionado of close to the metal sports electronics. When I stare at gym screens I immediately notice updates that are supposed to come in once a second to get randomly delayed by what must be hundreds of millis. But I can totally see why they went that route. It's a market where feature quantity is big as a success metric and using a maintenance-friendly platform is even bigger. Wether Android actually checks that box might be debatable, but a bad embedded implementation could easily be worse, no doubt about that.

In the old days, those screens would have randomly dropped into some Windows desktop failing to operate in some kiosk mode fantasy.

[miki123211]

And then you start selling in a country which demands accessibility for your equipment. Good luck getting a 20+ language human-sounding TTS system on your ESP32.